Quotes about pop-culture

Television hols up a mirror to the true nature of family life today. For the first time people see themselves reflected and refracted within its curved glass screen: helping them to define who the are and how they should behave. The introduction of the TV dinner and the TV tray means that families can now watch themselves while they eat. Behavior patterns start to undergo a radical alteration even as they are being affirmed a rescheduling of life in the suburban living room has taken place.

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

It's basically a joke." "I think it's cool," Julian says. "It's all about control, right?" He considers something. "It's not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you're also one of the producers--" I cut him off. "Why have you been tracking this?" "It's a big deal and--" "Julian, it's a movie," I say. "Why have you been tracking this? It's just another movie." "Maybe for you." "What does that mean?" "Maybe for others it's something else," Julian says. "Something more meaningful." "I get

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice.

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward. Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a y

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.

Describing current human mindsets reflecting our ignorance and cowardice and non action-oriented mentality:"I'm going to do nothing but escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my way out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of ins

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to

Human Millipede 6 was the highest-grossing movie of the summer and returned Nicholas Cage to Oscar-winning status.

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.

Alice is fictional. This isn't.

He was a boom boom shake the room " kind of guy

Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?""I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?"The doctor stared a

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likel

Hey, I said we don't carry weapons, I didn't say we couldn't defend ourselves." Captain Stanley Memphis, head of alien team disguised as pint-sized critters on a quest to learn if humans are savage bastards or a benevolent tribe.

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

Girl, we need to get you on a study program, fast. You're not going to last a week around here if you can't keep up with the pop culture references. How about Lord of the Rings? Firefly? Doctor Horrible? No? Clearly we have a lot of work to do.

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures.

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.

Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We’re not supposed to have it handed to us.

The mythology warped and twisted back along itself until Buffy Summers, the girl who once railed against the unfairness of being Chosen, looked at a squadron of girls who were just like she'd been and took away their right to Choose.

People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research team led by psychologist Leon Festinger. According to an alien entity named Sananda, the end of the world is due any day and under the most cataclysmic of circumstances. The group meets regularly to discuss the latest predictions from Sananda and the rest of the Space Brothers, all rel

Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.

The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.

Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.

If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only w

We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself. Behind its various feints, games and strategies lay a perception of behavior as a form of enforced conformity. People would only do what they were prompted to do. This was the thinking that held the lonely crowd together, briefly connecting the forward thrust of material progress with the broader evolutionary cur

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To

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I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

Because his [Damien Hirst] art is idea art - art drawn on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats, roughed out in airport departure lounges and the back of the taxis, usually delegated to and carried by others - this leaves Damien a lot of time for what might loosely be called socializing. Hanging around.

(Brin) 'How good is your lawyer, on a scale of Atticus Finch to Franklin and Bash?

We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes--who knows, really, but shifts in taste don't fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country's pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It's like we die i

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

They should.""Should be like a wood bee," she said.It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience.

In America, they have this thing called a story cycle. When they're at war, they start doing fantasy and war-style entertainment. When fantasy gets big, they go through a recession, and horror starts gaining popularity. When horror gets popular, mystery starts gaining popularity. Then when mystery reaches its peak, science fiction starts gaining popularity. Then things get rough again, and we go back to Fantasy". This quote was taken from an interview from The Myth of Cthulhu: Dark Navigation.

Imagine America as one house on a suburban lane. Years before he became a Jehovah's Witness, Prince knocked on America's door through his music. He came to the door holding a guitar and an umbrella while concealing a Bible. He flirted his way inside the door and told us he had a dirty mind and was controversial, and then he sat down in the living room on the good couch. And, when America's guard was down, because we thought we were having a conversation about sex, Prince eased out his Bible and

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

I want my rockstars dead.

I think the skin revolution for women, I will call it, really all started with Mariah Carey. Madonna was pretty risqué too, but she was pretty much always known as a "bad girl." Mariah was a good girl, supposedly Christian, turning very bad, in the late 90's. So then, all the other little girls and teens and women across America thought it would be ok for them to "come out" too essentially, or flaunt whatever they had. Modesty went completely out the window for many women, starting in the late 9

songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.

Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.

Fashion is simply a guideline for style-less people to appear stylish.

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "r

It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

I blame Doctor Who. Mr Spock. The Scooby Gang: both the ones in the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes. I've spent my life with stories of people who don't walk away, who go back for their friends, who make that last stand. I've been brainwashed by Samwise Gamgee.

On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]

...you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you're succeeding. People do not get scared when you are failing. It calms them. That's why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves "worrying about" Amanda Bynes.

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would seel her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker.

Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even mo

Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance tha

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.

In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there’s going to be something entirely different… death without remediation.

The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries -you can be an intellectual genius. If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost

In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you